Google’s Umbrella

ByScott Galloway ·

20 August 2015

Winners & Losers in Your Inbox.

This week’s first winner is the U.S. Postal Service, which delivers an estimated 40% of Amazon packages annually. While Amazon pays the USPS only half of what it pays UPS and FedEx, all packages are delivered pre-sorted and tailored for delivery routes. Plus, USPS needs all the help it can get, having lost $46 billion since 2007.

Is Conde Nast a winner or loser for its $20 million investment in Reddit? We’d argue they’re a winner: Reddit has achieved scale that escaped most of its peers. The website’s traffic in June was over 15 times the audience of vogue.com. Granted, Reddit’s offer for advertisers is very limited due to strict privacy policies and what appears to be an under-resourced technology team. Still, anything that’s in the news and scaling is likely worth a lot more than $20 million.

Google could also be either a winner or a loser with its new conglomeration strategy. Alphabet feels like an opportunity to create multiple titles, the way some agencies have a half-dozen chief digital officers. It could also be the beginning of a good bank/bad bank strategy where they split off money-losing operations – i.e. everything but Google.

A less ambiguous winner: Arby’s. The chain bought a 60-second spot on Jon Stewart’s last Daily Show thanking the host for being a friend — sort of. The ad featured all the times Stewart mentioned Arby’s, which he repeatedly portrayed in a less than flattering light (sample comparison: “Shock and awe for your bowels”). However, it seemed to impart a different message. In the hour following the show, tweets about Arby’s spiked significantly. Most of them were positive.